Thursday, October 13, 2011

Reports From The Womb Wars

Abortions will not be covered under the new health insurance rules if the US House has its way. It probably will not. For that it must wait until a wingnut is, once again, firmly in control of this country.

Providers that offer abortion coverage would have to set up identical plans without abortion coverage to participate in the health insurance exchanges to be set up under the new law.

....

Under the law, federally subsidized health care plans can offer abortion coverage but they have to set up separate accounts to segregate federal funds from funds that can be used for abortion coverage.
Pitts said these are nothing more than “accounting gimmicks” that won’t stop taxpayer money from being used to fund abortions.

Pitts is being silly, of course. Or not silly enough. Money is fungible, so any money spent on abortion anywhere could be construed as having come from taxpayer money if the person making the expenditures also got, say, a mortgage deductions in taxes. It's all about banning abortion by other means.

Democratic opponents were particularly upset about the conscience clause, saying it would lead to pregnant women being denied emergency treatment. “When the Republicans vote for this bill today they will be voting to say women can die on the floor and health care providers don’t have to intervene,” said Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
“This bill is putting the religious leaders’ views right there in the surgery room,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice.
They said it would override the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires that all people have access to emergency services.Pitts’ office said they were codifying a 2004 amendment to a spending bill that protects doctors who object to performing abortions. It said that there has never been a case where a doctor cited these protections to refuse necessary care and that Catholic hospitals, even with their strict standards, allow doctors to perform necessary procedures that could result in the death of a fetus.

Bolds are mine. Those sentences tell us so-very-clearly what Pitts thinks about the rights of pregnant women to get emergency care: They can just rely on whatever provider's conscience they happen to encounter! No need to codify the rights of the incubators, none at all.

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